Digital imaging capabilities have been integrated into a wide range of devices, including digital cameras, tablet computers, and mobile phones. Digital imaging devices or image capture systems can refer to any device that can capture one or more digital images, including devices that capture still images or videos.
The integration of digital processing technology with imaging devices has enabled more powerful and easier to use photographic products, and has enabled compact devices to capture and enhance image data. For example, digital imaging devices may employ image stitching, which is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most approaches to image stitching require nearly exact overlaps between images and identical exposures to produce seamless results. Some digital imaging devices can stitch their photos internally, while some image stitching techniques are performed on a separate computing device.
Existing approaches implement display of panoramic images through a user interface which depicts the panorama as a view image in the shape of a rectangular unwrapped image of a cylindrical projection. There are two problems with such a way to display the panorama view. First, it is difficult to show the entire image on a relatively small UI, for example the screen of smart phone. The resulting image is usually very wide relative to its height, and the larger the range of the view angle covered by the panorama, the wider the resulting image will be. As a result, the details of the panoramic image are not large enough to be clear when the whole panorama is viewed. Therefore, such rectangular panorama views are not suitable to be displayed on the small screen of a smart phone or digital camera display screen.
Moreover, a rectangular panorama display may make it difficult for a user to determine whether additional photos are necessary. Even where the user has captured images for the whole 360 degrees of the panorama, most approaches to image stitching require nearly exact overlaps between images to produce seamless results. If edge features of the individual images of the panorama do not match exactly, or if there is not sufficient overlap, this may cause imperfections in the assembly of the panorama. Even small misalignments between images of the panorama can result in stitching difficulties known as “keystoning” which refers to images which, when stitched together, are not vertically aligned. This leads to a cropped panorama image which does not cover the full 360 degree view. It is often difficult to ascertain what view angle is not covered by the panorama when viewing a rectangular view.